Your business and silos
In the early 90s, Jack Welch — the then CEO of General Electric — introduced the concept of the boundaryless organization. With the technological age visibly looming on the horizon, Welch foresaw that organizations would have to work to keep up by incorporating shorter decision cycles, stronger collaboration, and more employee engagement.
Over 20 years later, anthropologist Gillian Tett published her book, The Silo Effect, which emphasized the importance of eliminating the problems that stemmed from excessive silos defined in the modern-day workplace as when departments work almost entirely on their own with little to no interaction or sharing of goals, processes, and priorities with other departments.
In larger organizations, silos are natural and oftentimes necessary, but Tett emphasizes in her book that focus must be placed on identifying and combatting the issues that silos create. Problems stem from departments who are overly siloed. When that happens, these departments develop an “us vs. them” mentality which is detrimental to the unifying “we” mentality that organizations strive to have and that is imperative to an organization’s overall success.
The importance of cross-team collaboration
Cross-functional collaboration across teams happens when a group of people with different functional expertise come together to work toward a common goal — which in a broader sense is what it entails to effectively work for an organization. Working for a business means working for your company’s mission and vision — but when departments are too heavily compartmentalized, the primary focus shifts to working with the department in mind and not the business.
Different departments stand to benefit from one another. When diverse skill sets are utilized to collaborate with an end result in mind, the end result then emphasizes the strengths that different people and departments bring to the table.
Backed by numbers
Henry Ford once said, “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.”
A recent Stanford study found that working collectively on tasks can improve individual employee performance. Participants in the research-based study who worked collaboratively stuck to their tasks 64% longer than their solitary peers. The participants reported higher engagement levels, lower fatigue levels, and a higher success rate.
While the study focused on individuals, the same methodology can be applied to cross-team collaboration. When different teams are encouraged to collaborate, it not only personalizes departmental relationships — which also works to greatly eliminate the “us vs. them” mentality — it also saves time wasted on overlapping tasks and errors that stem from miscommunication — two primary issues that often stem from silos in the workplace.
Connecting solutions across teams
Where does Omnitracs stand on connecting, communicating, and collaborating?
With Omnitracs One, Omnitracs is connecting all fleet management solutions and teams across one, open-cloud platform. The platform not only opens the lines of communication between drivers and the back office, but also provides better overall visibility into an organization’s entire operation.
Check out our Omnitracs One page to learn more about our initiative to connect teams and solutions.